


breathe in, breathe out.

by babykanima



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M, Panic Attacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-23
Updated: 2013-03-23
Packaged: 2017-12-06 06:04:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/732272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babykanima/pseuds/babykanima
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s a while before he stops measuring his life on the amount of panic his body experiences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	breathe in, breathe out.

**Author's Note:**

> come and [ visit me ](http://clintssecretfamily.tumblr.com/)

Stiles often talks and talks and talks so fast he forgets how to breathe; sometimes it's fine, nothing special, kinda cool actually, the fact he stopped breathing and didn’t even _realise_. Other times he does realise and starts overcompensating. He breathes too much, too quickly for his lungs and he ends up on the floor, gasping, with his head between his knees with his mom coaching him through breathing normally once more.  
  
Either way, he always sort of feels like he's floating away.

* * *

  
He meets Lydia Martin and it’s a whole different sort of floating away.

“That’s love, kid.” His dad smiles at him when he tells his parents over breakfast one morning that Lydia Martin makes him feel _floaty_. His dad gazes happily at his mom as he takes a sip of his coffee and his mother pokes her tongue out at him over the pan full of pancake batter she’ll probably end up burning anyway and between them Stiles wrinkles his nose because if that’s love, then _eugh_. He doesn’t need it.

* * *

  
His panic attacks evolve after his mom dies, becomes less _weird breathing habits_ , and more _medication is needed, maybe therapy._   

He never doesn’t realise he’s not breathing again, because when these new attacks start, they start painful, his hands shake and his eyes tear up and he’s not crying, he’s not, his eyes just think he is.

The first time, his dad finds him on his bedroom floor, hunched over and wheezing, gasping, turning purple because he can’t _breathe_ , he can’t breathe, he’s going to die like his mom and his mom is _dead_ , oh god. Oh god, oh god, oh god. He can’t breathe, he can’t see anything because his vision goes black and he just wishes his dad would shut up and let him die. It feel like hours after that he finally calms down and by that time he’s in the hospital.

After, he feels terrible about the fact he wanted his dad to shut up, even if he was only thinking it, and even worse about how scared his dad looks sitting there by his scratchy hospital bed. How terrified that he’s going to lose Stiles too.

Then, he might cry a little.

(But it’s okay because it’s just his dad there to see and he won’t tell anybody).

* * *

Bright side? He meets Scott.

* * *

 

He gets used to them over time, learns to recognise the oncoming feeling and sometimes hold them at bay but it’s like, he’s panicking over nothing but it’s still panicking; his body doesn’t know the difference.

He grows older, the attacks become more and more uncommon and he kind of gets on with his life.

Scott turns into a werewolf, or rather, Scott _gets turned_ into a werewolf, and the panic attacks start again like they never left.

He feels like he’s drowning, like he’s being swept away. He feels like he’s holding his breath, desperate to just get to the top, get out of the water and onto land where breathing is easier. He feels like he’s gonna be stuck underwater for the rest of his life, like there _is_ no land.

He feels like he’ll never escape them.

The doctor readjusts his medicine again, tells him not to feel bad because _Anxiety is a lifelong illness, son. It’s not your fault._

He kind of wants to laugh in the doctor’s face because it _is_ , it is his fault. If he hadn’t wanted to see (half) a dead body, none of this would have happened.

The only good thing about this time is that they’re quieter, more controllable. Still, they hurt and leave him _aching_ and _shaking_ and out of sorts and frankly he hates it (if you were to look at the graph he made saved on his computer under ‘IHATEYOUALLOMG!!!’ which was basically just a list of things he hates on a scale of one to Alpha werewolves, panic attacks are probably closer to the things trying to freaking _kill_ him than an actual number).

* * *

It’s weird but his panic attacks are what he uses to measure things, this time.

When they’re in danger, actual, oh-my-god-I-might-not-make-it-home danger, the panic is like a feeling in his limbs. His fingers tingle and his legs shake just enough to let him know that if he makes it out of this alive, if he survives long enough, there’s gonna be a horrible attack waiting for him. His shaky legs let him know that if he doesn’t die, later he’s gonna wish he did. 

A tightness in his chest that makes him think of heart attacks and his dad’s cholesterol are slightly easier to handle in that sometimes he can choke them off. It’s like crying, he muses. Sometimes you can stop yourself and sometimes you can’t. Those attacks happen when they’re planning potential deadly things or when his dad has to do a thirty seven hours shift because they’re short-staffed due to half the town’s sheriff department dying horrible, horrible deaths.

There’s stupider things he panics over that leave him huffing like he’s run a marathon or shivering and cold; when he realises Scott and Isaac played Halo for six hours the other day and _that’s_ why his best friend hadn’t answered his phone call or like when he goes back to Jungle alone a few weeks after he’s there with Scott, but that turns out not to be too terrifying and hey, this time _he_ gets free drinks.

All of these panic attacks are scary and uncontrollable and they make him feel like he’s floating – it’s a lack of oxygen to the brain his doctor tells him, it’s dangerous and we need to keep an eye on it – but Derek is different; Derek keeps Stiles' feet firmly on the ground.

* * *

 

It’d started with a bang, like he’d always kind of imagined love does. A bang of lips meeting, a bang of bodies pushing against each other and then against the wall and then the bed. A bang.

(He swears he could almost _hear_ it, an honest-to-god crash of _lightning_ right there in his bedroom with his dad asleep down the hall). 

They make out hard and fast and wet and messy and then it all slows down. The hands, the lips, it all becomes hard and soft and slow all at once and it’s allconsuming, this feeling in his bones of “More. More, Derek, give me more.”

It goes quiet and sweet and he can’t look away because he’s looking into the eyes of something perfect.

* * *

He'd always thought falling in love with Derek Hale would be like an avalanche or a forest fire; something wild and unstoppable and it might have started like that but not one hour into whatever _this_ was, it was already different than he’d expected.

(Not that he'd _expected_ to fall in love with Derek Hale, but if he _had_ he thinks he might have imagined it would be something like that).

Instead, it's _quiet_.

Months go past and the feeling slips in, unnoticed for a very long time because it is so different from how he'd always felt about Lydia, from how he thought love was meant to be, that when he finally recognises it it's too late to back out now.

They’d gone on dates, on actual, hand-holding (and hadn’t that been a painful experiment?) dates. Nobody knows but that’s just another way it’s quiet because his dad is the law and what they’re doing is technically illegal, what with Stiles being underage and they don’t tell Scott because Scott is Scott and that means he’s kind of hard-headed and anti-Derek.

(Little known fact: while Scott McCall is the most loyal friend you will ever have, he also has like, two different sides. The giant, lovable puppy and the giant obtuse jerk. Honestly, there’s no happy medium.

It’s been that way long before werewolves came into their lives, Stiles tells Derek fondly. He’s an idiot but he’s my idiot.)

Loving Derek is more like the _aftermath_ of a disaster than an actual disaster, less like that forest fire or avalanche than he’d expected. It's the quiet after the storm rather than before because he's not _waiting_ for anything because he’s already _got_ everything.

* * *

It’s a while before he stops measuring his life on the amount of panic his body experiences, but the one thing he never manages to panic over is that he’s Derek’s and Derek is his.

 


End file.
